Hey Friends and Family,

Please make a note to send good vibes my way on Monday (9/25). I’ll be having a revision surgery related to last fall’s mastectomy and reconstruction. I’ll send a quick update this weekend once I know my OR time. Once I’m safely on the other side, I welcome your best jokes about having surgery on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). Let’s hope for an early OR time, or I’ll too, be fasting.  Doesn’t everyone want a Break the Fast celebration of jello and saltines with a side of painkillers? 

To answer the rapid fire questions I assume you have: 

• This will be outpatient. About 3 hours under anesthesia. 
• This is covered by insurance (Yippie for the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act (WHCRA) of 1998 that states if your mastectomy is covered by insurance all reconstruction surgeries are.) 
• My plastic surgeon will:
  • Remove skin islands (i.e. getting rid of the transplanted belly skin, thus going from “double crescent moon scars” to a single scar on each breast) 
  • Revise painful keloid scars 
  • Graft fat from my thighs to my breasts, filling divots and adding volume. More details in the TMI section because “What?! They can do this???”
• Recovery will be “easier” in that everything is “surface level”, and my lifting restriction will be 2-3 weeks. 
• However, I’m told inner thigh liposuction is more painful than a mastectomy. WTF and how is this true?  Guess I get to level up for “Would You Rather” (Sarcastic “yippie”). 
• My parents will be helping for 3 weeks post surgery, and my brother for a few days. 
• I’ve got a village of folks ready to pick the kids up from school in case I don’t feel safe alone outside with Owen after my parents leave. (FYI to neighbors home during the day, this is your notice you are the backup to my backups!) 
• I look forward to “shopping” my closet once all the swelling goes down (in a few months?), donating most of my clothes, and learning to dress and love this new body of mine, and move on with my life.  

If this is your first email update (thanks for being part of the village!) and if you’d like the backstory beyond I have a BRCA mutation and am having my 4th surgery related to reducing my cancer risk you can check out past email updates on my website.  If you have family/friends dealing with genetic cancer risks and/or mastectomy and/or difficult recoveries and/or a situation that doesn’t have “a right answer” feel free to pass these on. 

XOXO,

Jessie 

TMI Details. Content warnings include liposuction, fat, pain, potty talk, and of course nipples.  

I haven’t emailed since I was 8 weeks post op. Now I’m 47 weeks! From a functional, day-to-day, non-exercise perspective, my body is nearly back to baseline. Lifting heavy things is still not always possible. However, a few weeks ago, I “full body parented” for the first time! I.e. carry a sleeping (dead weight) 37 pound Owen up two flights of stairs. This was a significant moment. Major win on the recovery journey. 

If you’re not catching my social media updates, I’m still dealing with shoulder trouble from the mastectomy: a muscle below my shoulder blade went “dormant”, leaving my right shoulder with less than full range of motion and lack of stability. Strength building has been a priority. But strength building is moving a 2 pound weight in figure eights, holding 4 pounds for a count of 5 at arms length, and impressive feats like that. In other areas I’m having fun: I’ve been in the pool a lot and built up to swimming a mile (!) and just this weekend I did a 56.8 mile bike ride! Yeah for a functioning body! Maybe by the spring equinox, my shoulder will be stable and my abdominals strong enough to do 108 sun salutations. A girl can dream. 

Each rehab professional I’ve worked with has a different theory on what happened. After talking with the breast surgeon, the most likely is a pinched nerve from laying in one position on an operating table for 8.5 hours. But I’m progressing. I have not counted all the OT and PT appointments, but in March I had 11 recovery/wellness appointments. Yikes. July was more reasonable with only 4. If you have a slog of a recovery, resembling a part time job, I highly recommend the book “Beautiful Trauma” by Rebecca Fogg. Her hand blew up in a freak toilet explosion. She documents her year of physical, mental, and spiritual recovery. I’ve never felt so seen. 

So, yep, I’m going back under the knife. Turns out, breasts are difficult to reconstruct. After living with frankenboobs for 10 months, I’m ready. I had hoped to be one of the lucky ones who didn’t feel the need for revision. Revisions are more common than I allowed myself to realize. It’s difficult to not recognize or like what you see in the mirror, when what you see changed due to drastic reasons. I had hoped the breast lift and reduction prior to the mastectomy would have allowed me to avoid a follow up surgery. At least it allowed me to keep my nips, and there were no major mastectomy complications. Worth it. 

Here’s a great metaphor I heard: if breast reconstruction is baking the cake, a revision surgery is the icing, smoothing out all the lumps and bumps that got stuck to the cake pan. 

For me, the icing will be my own body fat. Fat they will “gather” via liposuction. From my thighs. My inner thighs. There may or may not be a thigh gap in my future. 

The first time I learned about this as “the best option” for my body was last week at my final pre surgery consultation. 

I know, not great for planner Jessie. I’m flexing my “let it go” and “trust” muscles. I  stopped myself going down the rabbit hole of internet horror. Inner thigh lipo can result in unsightly shaped thighs if done on “poor/thin skin quality”.  After a few pokes and prods, my plastic surgeon assured me my “thighs can handle it”. Fingers crossed. I keep reminding myself I did a lot of research before I picked him back in 2022, and he is known for his perfectionism when it comes to aesthetic outcomes. 

I assumed they would use fat from my torso, which is what we have been talking about for months. Turns out all this high protein and exercise does shift body composition. I no longer have enough fat in my torso to fill in the divots and return them to my pre-mastectomy/post-reduction size. 

With the curve ball of inner thigh lipo, I’m spending this last week before surgery learning about compression garments for my legs. And open gussets. That’s the technical word for a pee hole in leggings. Didn’t know this until yesterday. The things I now know. SMH. And a female urinal. Cuz taking tight AF fabric up and down over one’s bruised painful thighs when instructed to stay hydrated is a bummer. And those gussets? Ladies who have gone before me report gussets are not so easy to pee out of. Ha! Speaking of potty talk, you know you’re “good at surgery” and close to the next one when you cross “check stool softener supply” off your list of things to do. FFS Jessie. 

Okay, let’s end on something good, cuz this went down the toilet quickly. Living without BRCA/breast cancer anxiety is incredible. I’m pleased to report the lightness I experienced on day one has only continued to grow. I’m grateful to have mental space in my life. I’m regularly daydreaming about the far off future, statistically it’s likely to happen. I’m also much better at recognizing moments with the kids, and enjoying the hilarity that is 4 and 6. Seriously, if you need a laugh, just hang out at our house for an afternoon. Some days they are battling Dino’s (with short T-rex arms and two fingers as claws, so precise!), some days they are rhinocats (a figment of Ethan’s imagination), and others they talk about Owen’s imaginary friend Boppi, who is driving an RV from outer space to visit us. 

Even though Monday’s surgery doesn’t impact my cancer risk, once healed, my daily experience of pain should be gone and I’ll have even more mental space (since I won’t be squinting my eyes and catching my breath every time I look in the mirror, trying to connect the image I don’t recognize to the body I feel) thus increasing my quality of life. Yeah for high quality of life. 

#BRCA #BRCA2 #EmailToFriendsNFamily